Very interesting were prehistoric horse types no larger than sheep. Indeed, one who had not studied ancient evolution types might have mistaken them for short-eared rabbits. A close examination would have shown many differences, though. For one thing, the horselike head was quite pronounced.
Many species of chipmunklike creatures scurried about. These ranged from the size of a mouse to animals larger than dogs. As the ground sloped upward toward a hill, these hole-dwellers became more plentiful.
Suddenly a foul, slate-colored cloud whipped over the jungle. The stirring of great wings like filthy canvas on a skeleton frame made the fronds of the gigantic ferns clatter together as in a gale.
Doc flattened. The slimy wings beat above him. It was as though a great invisible hand were shaking a loose bundle of vile cloth. The rancid reek of carrion was wafted by the squirming wings.
But Doc had been too quick. The immense flying reptile was carried past by its own momentum. Its tooth-armored beak grabbed space with a rattling like boards clattered together.
Not even whipping erect, Doc’s bronze form flew like an arrow for the nearest safety — a clump of thorny growth some acres in extent. He had an idea the membranous wings of the pterodactyls were tender. They would not venture into the thorns.
He reached safety! The aлrial reptile crashed in after him. The thorns spiked it. With a hideous roaring and gargling outcry, it sprang back.
Doc drew his pistol. He could at least disable this monster with a couple of shots, then be on his way.
But another pterodactyl abruptly came! Then another! The cries of the first had attracted them. And they kept coming.
The great batlike shapes became so thick overhead as to literally blot out what light there was. And the wind their wings made bent and twisted the fern fronds and threatened to rend them from their anchorage. The putrid stench was near overpowering.
* * *
DOC was in a dilemma. He didn’t have cartridges enough to fight the pterodactyls. To venture out of the thorn patch would be fatal.
Evidently the flying reptiles often chased quarry into the thorns. For, despite the almost nonexistent brains of the things, they knew enough not to venture among the stickers.
Doc relentlessly settled down to wait until the pterodactyls gave up and went away. He believed they would soon depart — if he kept motionless.
But a horrible new development came!
One of the colossal hopping reptiles came bounding up! It was drawn by the cloud of aлrial monsters. Perhaps it had secured quarry which the pterodactyls had chased into the thorns, on other occasions.
The thorny thicket bothered the terrible tyrannosaurus killer not at all! Its tough hide was impervious! It walked into the thorn patch and began to look for Doc. Hopping a couple of hundred feet, it would stop to turn around slowly.
Its hideous, stringlike front legs — legs that were none the less thick as a barrel — flipped in a ghastly fashion. Probably this was caused by the nervous gnawings of appetite. But it looked to the Doc like the thing was clapping hands over the prospect of a human meal!
Doc moved only when the hideous head with its tremendous, frothing rows of teeth was turned from him. Then he took care not to make noise.
He had an unpleasant feeling the reptile titan was going to find him — unless he did something quickly!
To complicate things, he unexpectedly confronted one of the black, marked, bushy-tailed predecessors of the modern polecat. The noisome thing gave every sign of going into action.
Doc’s gun rapped twice. So well-placed were the shots that the bushy-tailed animal dropped instantly.
The reptilian monster had heard the shots. It hopped through the thorns, searching. Its vicious eyes seemed about to pop from its revolting head in its blood lust.
Suddenly it bounded straight for the spot where Doc had shot the striped animal.
But Doc’s accomplished wits were equal to the occasion. He had drawn his knife. With quick strokes, he skinned the beast he had shot.
He draped the distinctive black-and-white hide over him like a coat!
Doc now walked boldly out of the thorn thicket!
The hopping monster, mistaking him for the malodorous animal, in the hide of which he was masquerading, backed off.
Even the flying reptiles, the batlike pterodactyls, made the same mistake. They flopped away from him as though he were a plague.
Doc hurried to freedom!
* * *
HE pursued the trail of Kar’s men with more caution, aware it was vaguely possible the villains might have located him by the shots and the cloud of reptile bats.
The steps of the fleeing pair suddenly took to an open glade. The length of their paces showed they were making a wild sprint.
The reason was soon apparent.
Doc came upon a scene of carnal slaughter. The spongy ground was rent, upheaved. Footprints were deep as Doc’s hips! The tracks of a tyrannosaurus, a terrible killer titan of a reptile such as the one from which he had just escaped!
The prehistoric monster had devoured Kar’s two men! Doc, gazing about, saw unmistakable proof of that fact. A shoe, a portion of a human foot still in it, and bits of two different suits of clothing, gave the evidence.
The pair had met a fitting end, considering the evil nature of the journey which had put them abroad in the ghastly night within the crater.
Doc turned back. He ran. The two unfortunate villains, in dragging the giant prehistoric beaver to the grove of ferns where Doc and his men had bivouacked, had undoubtedly left another trail. Doc intended to follow that.
He had pursued the outward trail with great speed, but his return was immeasurably swifter. He carried the black-and-white pelt, rolled tight so it would not smell so badly, under one mighty bronze arm.
A shock awaited him at the spot where he had left his friends. They were gone!
Many tracks were about. They told Doc’s jungle-wise eyes a story — told it as perfectly as a book could have.
Kar had seized his friends!
Chapter 21. HUMAN MONSTERS
WITH the swiftness of a trade wind, Doc took up the new trail. It was broad, plain. Entirely too plain!
Doc knew Kar would expect him to follow. Probably the man would set a trap. He would hope that Doc’s excitement over the capture of his friends would dull his keen senses.
But the shocking knowledge served only to sharpen Doc’s perceptive powers. He kept wide of the trail, his keen eyes locating it by the most vague of signs. A stalking leopard could not have gone more silently than the bronze giant.
A tiny patch of thorns appeared. Discovering the trail of Kar’s men and their captives — Doc’s friends — led directly through the burry growth, Doc approached furtively to investigate.
"They’re not overlooking any bets!" he said grimly.
For a considerable distance into the thicket, the needle-tipped thorns were daubed with a brownish substance. Undoubtedly a deadly poison!
It was the first of Kar’s traps!
Doc went on, not lessening his caution.
Kar’s men had taken their prisoners along the crater side, traversing a region Doc had not yet explored. They held a course as straight as possible. It seemed they had a definite objective.
Doc’s golden eyes picked up the tracks of Renny, Monk, and Ham in one spot. The trail of Long Tom and Johnny appeared soon after. None of them seemed to be wounded. At least, their footprints did not show the uneven depth and irregular spacing characteristic of a badly injured man.
Oliver Wording Bittman was lagging behind the whole group. However, his tracks also seemed normal.
But Doc knew he would have to make speed. His friends were being kept alive for only one reason, he believed. Kar was using them as a bait to decoy Doc into a trap.
Rather, into a series of traps! For Doc’s adamant gaze located a creeper across his path. The vine stretched just a bit too tautly. He investigated.
The creeper
was attached to the trip of a machine gun! Had Doc as much as touched it, a stream of lead would have riddled him.
He detached the machine gun and took it along, to use on Kar if necessary.
Sometime later, he found another of the poisoned thorn reception committees arranged for him. There was a deadfall which probably wouldn’t have broken his back, considering the speed with which Doc could move. A more dangerous snare came next.
Doc noted a peculiar, dragging movement Monk’s big feet made at intervals.
"Good boy, Monk!" Doc smiled.
Monk was making those marks with his feet just before each trap. He was warning Doc!
The mighty bronze man now made better time.
The ground here was higher than any upon which Doc had stood within the crater — excepting only the rim of the mud lake up on the crater side. And this spot was so far from the point where he had surveyed the crater bottom that the ever-present fog of moist, hot air had prevented him seeing much of the detail.
The jungle growth abruptly became scattering. Small glades appeared. Then larger meadows! A rank, crude sort of grass floored these. The ground felt less spongy.
A mass of rock jutted up before him. It lay close to the sheer, nearly two-mile-high cliff of the crater wall. No doubt it had fallen from the wall centuries ago.
To Doc, the rock looked big as a sizable cut off Gibraltar. Others were behind it, too. They were nearly as large. All had toppled from the hulking cliff.
The trail weaved among these. Doc kept fully a hundred yards to one side, wary of bushwhackers. He came to a vast dornick which had a deeply corrugated surface. This would offer shelter to a climber. Doc mounted to reconnoiter.
He saw Kar’s plane!
* * *
THE craft was an amphibian — could land on ground or water. It had two motors, both very large. Its cabin would accommodate eight or nine passengers. The long upper wing and the bobbed lower wing and rudder and elevators were joined in a spidery box kite of a framework.
With black fuselage and yellow wings, it looked like a bloated dragonfly crouched in a natural hangar formed by the leaning together of two great stone blocks.
Huge timber had been employed to build a massive fence to keep out lesser carnivora. The cavern between the two blocks of rock was too small at the entrance to admit the king-giant of the killer reptiles, the tyrannosaurus.
The construction work had been done some time ago! Months past, at least!
"Kar built the hangar on his other trip!" Doc concluded.
Clambering down from his lofty perch, Doc approached the plane. He was not molested. Kar probably had no more than three men surviving. At least, only three had captured Doc’s friends. As for that capture — how had a mere three thugs managed to get the upper hand on Doc’s men?
Doc had his suspicions. They were far from pleasant!
Doc investigated the craft. He found a few boxed supplies in the cabin. These proved to be canned goods and dried fruit. Although Doc was hungry, having had nothing but meat since entering the crater, he did not touch the grub. He knew in just what subtle forms poison can be administered.
Doc quitted the strange hangar. Tall grass outside the massive timber gates absorbed his bronze figure.
Kar’s headquarters should be somewhere near. Doc was hunting it. His men would be prisoners there, since they had not been in the hangar.
In the distance, faint spots in the moonlightlike day within the steam-covered crater, the fearsome bats of reptiles still circled. Probably they had not quitted the thorn patch where they had chased Doc. They were more tenacious of purpose than he had thought.
Somewhere, a prehistoric beast emitted a series of hideous cries. The echoes were taken up by another reptile. For a moment, a bedlam, remindful of the awful night sounds reigned. Then comparative quiet fell.
It was a ghastly spot — this lost land of terror which reposed within the cone of Thunder Island.
* * *
DOC came suddenly upon his imprisoned friends. They were being held within another natural cave resulting from the massive blocks of stone piling together. Doc heard voices first.
"You guys just make one move — you’re finished!" A strange tone. It must be one of Kar’s men.
With no noise at all, Doc’s bronzed, giant figure floated nearer. His golden eyes watched the cave mouth — and all the surrounding terrain.
"I’ll rush him!" Monk’s big, amiable voice offered. "He can’t get us all!"
Evidently only one man watched the prisoners within the cavern!
"No need of that, yet," rumbled Renny. Thunder gobbling out of a barrel would have had a close resemblance to Renny’s vast voice.
"Let him be a hero!" clipped Ham. The quick-thinking lawyer seldom got in a spot so tight that he neglected to razz Monk.
"Can’t you see what they’re doing?" Long Tom demanded. "They’re holding us as a bait to get Doc!"
"Bait or no bait," Johnny, the geologist, put in, "Doc will take care of himself. And if we went and got ourselves shot, we’d still be bait. I’m in favor of stringing along for a while to see what happens."
"That’s a wise guy!" snarled the coarse voice of Kar’s gunman. "You birds behave, an’ we’ll do the white thing by you, see! We’ll let you keep on livin’! We’ll leave you behind in the crater when we take off in our plane!"
He laughed uproariously at this. He knew life in the crater would be one long living hell! A more perilous domicile would be hard to imagine.
"I gotta notion to rush ‘im!" Monk rumbled.
"You have no such idea — you’re just working that noisy mouth!" Ham sneered. "I wonder what they’re doing to Oliver Wording Bittman?"
"Hard to tell," said Renny. "They took him away shortly after we reached here. I can’t imagine why."
Monk made an angry hur-r-rum of a sound. "What’s still puzzlin’ me is how they got us! We had Ham, Long Tom and Johnny on guard. If they’d have sneaked up on Ham, I could understand how they got near enough to cover us before we could put up a fight. But the way it was — "
"Pipe down!" rasped their guard, tired of the talk.
Monk continued, " — but the way it was we — "
"Pipe down, you funny-lookin’ baboon!" the guard snarled. "I’m gettin’ so I don’t like to watch that ugly phiz of yours when you jabber!"
At this, Ham laughed.
"And the muffler goes on you, too!" gritted the guard. "You cocky shyster mouthpiece!"
Silence fell within the cave.
Doc waited a while. His keen brain worked. His five friends were here in the cave. But Oliver Wording Bittman was somewhere else.
Doc decided to find Bittman. Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny were in no immediate danger.
Away from the cavern entrance, Doc crept. The tall grass, coarse as the leaves of cattails growing on a pond bank, concealed him.
He encountered a tiny mound. Starting to go around it, he stopped.
It was a grave! The tombstone was a stone slab. A name and brief inscription had been painted upon it. Doc read:
Here Lies
GABE YUDER
Trampled to death by a Tyrannosaurus
Doc examined the grave. It was months old!
For quite an interval, the mighty bronze man did not move, but remained as quiescent as a statue of the solid metal he resembled.
* * *
MEN approaching drew Doc Savage’s attention from the grass-grown burial mound. Although his mind had been elsewhere, his full faculties had never deserted the business at hand. He had not relaxed his alertness to danger.
"He probably ain’t had time to get here yet," said a coarse voice.
"You don’t know that bronze guy!" growled the other. "I tell you, he may already be hangin’ around here. He may be waitin’ to jump onto us like a cat onto a mouse."
"Listen!" sneered the first speaker. "He never made it past them traps we left! Especially the poisoned thorns! That was good! And th
e machine gun we left with a vine hooked to the trigger! That wasn’t bad, either."
"But supposin’ — "
"Supposin’ nothin’! If he gets here, we’re gonna have our eyes open!"
"He may be too smart to even try to trail us. He may decide to let his men take care of themselves. What then?"
"So much the better! We’ll go off an’ leave him here! He’ll be where he’ll never bother Kar again."
"But he might find where we mined the ingredients for our fresh supply of the Smoke of Eternity. They say the bronze guy is quite a chemist. Even a second-rate chemist like you was able to make up a fresh batch of the Smoke of Eternity after Kar told you how!"
"Who’s a second-rater?" snarled the other man. "I don’t like that crack! Next to Kar, I’m the fair-haired boy in this scatter! Damn you, I won’t have — "
"Aw — don’t get on fire! I know you’re a great guy in certain lines, but only a fair chemist. Supposin’ the bronze guy figured out how the Smoke Of Eternity was made? With enough of the stuff, he could open a tunnel right through the side of this crater. He might get out — "
"What if he did? Kar would have a new gang together. There’d be no slips like there was this last time. Doc Savage wouldn’t have a chance against Kar."
"Maybe," the skeptical one mumbled. "But I’d rest easier if I had the bronze guy in front of a machine gun for about a minute. I just wish I had that chance!"
He got it almost before the words were off his lips. Doc stood up!
But did the Kar gunman shoot? He didn’t!
He gave a squawk of surprise and terror and fell on his face in the grass.
* * *
DOC SAVAGE never shot a man except in actual defense of his own life, or that of some one else. Hence, he waited for the loud-mouthed one to lift the submachine gun he was carrying. But the man whipped down.
Coarse grass shook as the fellow crawled away. He was taking to his heels!
The second gunman was sterner stuff. He tilted his rapid firer. Bur-r-r-rip!It was spewing lead long before it came level. The slugs chopped grass to bits halfway to Doc.
The big bronze man’s pistol spoke once. The report was like that given off by the popper of a hard-snapped bull whip.
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